CloudFlare, best known for its cloud cyber-security service, is growing at a mind-boggling pace.
Over the last three years, CloudFlare has grown 450% annually, and is currently adding about 5,000 new clients a day, Matthew Prince, its programmer/lawyer-turned-founder, tells us
It is now handling the equivalent of roughly 5% of the entire web’s traffic through its servers and, just as we predicted in 2012, CloudFlare is indeed a monster company in the making.
Prince is on a mission to ‘build a better Internet.’ To do so, CloudFlare’s technology serves as what many call the “digital bouncer” for its 2 million-plus client websites. That means it fights off malicious hacker attacks.
But CloudFlare is bigger than just a cyber-security firm. It also improves a website’s performance by offering classic networking services like routing and switching (helping computers connect over the Internet), load balancing (making sure computer servers don’t get overloaded), and performance acceleration (helping websites run faster) among other things. It is essentially creating a cloud service that parallels the features of many of Cisco’s hardware products.
Prince wrote his college thesis on “Why the Internet was a fad” (which he now calls “embarrassing”) but his experience working on the Internet from its early days made him realize the “incredibly disruptive” potential of it. Now he wants to help the Internet live up to its promise – a place he calls, “where anyone, anywhere can publish information and get access to that information.”
We had a chance to catch up with Prince and ask more about his company’s explosive growth. The below interview has been edited for clarity.
Business Insider: Why is your company growing so fast?
Matthew Prince: The honest answer is we don’t entirely know. We have done almost no marketing, we have a nascent sales team, but we have a large client base from Fortune 50 financial services to national governments across the world. Just this week, we added Reddit, the 17th largest site in the U.S. If we added up all the page views of our customers’ sites, then we would have over 400 billion page views a month.
BI: What’s drawing people to your service?
MP: We made resources that were previously only used by big companies like Google available to everyone online. The initial interest in CloudFlare is for security, but that’s only for about 25% of our customers. Another 25% want — For more information read the original article here.
